Vincent Ward
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Vincent Ward (born Greytown, New Zealand, in 1956) is a film director and screenwriter. He was trained as an artist and made a pair of highly regarded short films (A State of Siege and In Spring One Plants Alone) before his first feature-length film, the lyrical yet lonely Vigil, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, The Navigator, took four years to make and won six AFI awards.
Map of the Human Heart (1993), a surreal romance set in World War II, while only a modest commerical success, remains Ward's most critically acclaimed film to date.
In the years following Map, Ward made an abortive attempt to direct and script Alien³, but the film's backers were leery of his underlying concept: a spirtual parable involving monks aboard a giant wooden ark in space. He was eventually asked to leave the project.
Despite this setback, Ward's next feature moved away from the lower budgets and art-house atmosphere of his earlier works: the Hollywood-friendly What Dreams May Come ($90m), starring Robin Williams, appeared in 1998.
River Queen, set in 19th-century New Zealand and starring Samantha Morton and Kiefer Sutherland, was still in post-production as of February 2005.
Ward is a personal friend of director Mike Figgis and will occasionaly do cameos in his films, such as in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and One Night Stand (1997).
Filmography (Directorial only)
- State of Siege (1978) (short)
- In Spring One Plants Alone (1981) (short)
- Vigil (1984, director and writer)
- The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988, director and writer)
- Map of the Human Heart (1993, director and writer)
- What Dreams May Come (1998)
- River Queen (2005)